How to squeeze more life from your batteries

Lifehacker has come up with their Top 10 Battery Hacks, Tips and Tricks. While many of the tips are sensible practics that everyone, and not just frugal folks should do to squeeze more life from your batteries (e.g., turning off the LCD screen of digital cameras to save battery juice, turning off 3G when not in use, disabling all that eye candy stuff that suck power, etc.), the one that really got me chuckling is turning Size C batteries into Size D in a pinch with quarters! Now, who would have thought of that?

Recycling Your Tech Stuff

Are you one of those who have accumulated all kinds of electronic gadgets and equipment that have become obsolete and now gathering dust somewhere around your home? Why not recycle them? You could get a tax write-off or even cold hard cash. This Computerworld article, Recycle Your Tech Gear: It's Easier Than You Think explains to you the ins and outs of tech recycling and how you could even get some cash from your old stuff.

UPDATE: New York Time's Frugal Traveler Column on Netbooks

After I shared my own experiences with my newly acquired netbook, which has displaced my heavier ThinkPad R52 to become my principal travel computer (and companion), lo and behold, the New York Times' Frugal Traveler Column agrees with me in its latest column (published April 15, 2009): Lighter on Laps and Wallets.

The Netbook as a Frugal Replacement for Laptops? My Netbook Experiences

I have always been a mobile computing person. I never owned a desktop. My first laptop was a ThinkPad 755 that I bought in 1994. Since then, I have always been a loyal ThinkPad user. My current ThinkPad, a ThinkPad R52that I bought in May 2005 almost 4 years ago, has traveled with me as I used it for work and pleasure. I love my ThinkPad, especially its fabulous keyboard and its signature red eraserhead trackpoint. The ThinkPad keyboard is as good, if not better than many desktop keyboards. Unfortunately, I have grown weary of toting it when I travel for business. Truth be told, lugging along 8 lbs (including power supply) in a shoulder bag is beginning to wear me down.


Enter a new game changer, the netbook, which has exponentially exploded in popularity around the second half of 2008. If you have no idea what I am talking about, the New York Times technology columnist David Pogue has written an excellent column on netbooks: When Laptops Go Light. I got my first attempt at evaluating a physical netbook when I visited my local Circuit City's liquidation sale in February 2009. I tried the Lenovo Ideapad S10 Netbook and the HP Mini Netbook. I found both netbooks very attractive and more importantly, really compact and light. I finally settled for the Ideapad S10 instead of the HP Mini Netbook because of two reasons: (1) price: the Ideapad S10 (at $380.oo inclusive of sales tax) was about $80.00 cheaper, and more importantly, (2) I kept missing the unintuitive (at least for me) mouse buttons that are mounted on the left and right of the touchpad (which was a deal-killer for me).

I have now used the Ideapad S10 for two months. Here are my thoughts. First, notwithstanding its small size, the IdeaPad is more advanced than my aging ThinkPad R52. Specifically, my ThinkPad R52only has 512 MB of RAM, a 80 GB hard drive that is showing its age, no webcam or ExpressCard slot. Because of its puny RAM, which was ample in 2005 but small by today's standards, my ThinkPad R52was always using virtual RAM on the hard drive, thereby slowing down many of today's memory-hungry programs. By contrast, the Ideapad S10, which is running Windows XP Home SP3, has 1 GB of RAM and a roomy 160 GB hard drive, a 1.3 megapixel webcam and an express card. Ironically, programs run faster on my netbook, since the 1 GB RAM meant that programs need not access virtual memory on the hard drive. The 10 inch screen on my Ideapad S10 netbook was surprisingly sharp, crisp and easy to read, with its LCD backlight (compared with the 14 inch screen on my ThinkPad R52, with a fluorescent backlight that has gradually dimmed over the 4-year lifespan). The Ideapad S10's 2.7 lb weight means that it is truly a delight to lug around compared with my heavier ThinkPad.

Enough about the positives. I have only one complaint: the 92% size keyboard. I confess that I keep hitting the wrong keys, having grown used to the standard size ThinkPad R52 keyboard. This is no big deal, since I use my ThinkPad R52 for typing intensive work, while my Ideapad S10 becomes my traveling partner, to be used for giving presentations and doing web-based tasks, e.g., web browsing, checking e-mail, using Skype, etc. The lack of an optical drive (my ThinkPad comes with a removable DVD burner) is no deal breaker either, since I am a heavy user of Google Docs and use portable flash drives to move software and data files around. Moreover, I rarely watch movies on DVDs, turning instead to watching streaming movies and tv shows on hulu.com and boxee.tv. My Ideapad S10 doesn't blink an eye when it streams video from hulu.com and boxee.tv.

Compared to the prices of current ThinkPad models, I truly think that my Ideapad S10 is really value for money. As I grow older, I no longer wish to lug along a heavier laptop. If my ThinkPad R52 were to go off to laptop heaven tomorrow, I will not buy another ThinkPad as a replacement. Instead, I'll just get an external wireless keyboard to use with my Ideapad S10. While it is true that the first generation of netbooks made too many compromises to be useful as mainstream laptop replacements, I find the current and forthcoming models of netbooks are full of features found in more expensive laptops (minus the weight), such that there is no compelling reason to buy a laptop today for general work, unless one is looking for a gaming machine or doing graphics intensive work. Besides, netbooks are priced so competitively that a frugal person like me can buy one and an external keyboard, and go away a happy camper.